On 15th August 2024, India marks its 78th Independence Day. Six days earlier, a female doctor at R.G. Kar Medical College, Kolkata, was brutally raped and murdered in a seminar room on the fourth floor, where she had gone to rest during her night shift. Her semi-naked body, splattered with blood, was discovered in the morning. This Independence Day, one needs to talk not about the glory of the nation but about the subjugated carcasses that have gone into its making. The flag of freedom has to be confronted with the bricks of brutality on which it is hoisted.
What does “freedom” mean for the women of India? In the nationalist discourse, the cry of freedom is meant to inculcate a feeling of loyalty to the Indian nation-state, which is tasked with the protection of its people. The people of the country transfer their power to the nation-state. A macho guardian thus arises to shield its subjects from aggressions. This transferal of power is the general template that buttresses different kinds of authority. In patriarchy, women are forced to transfer their power to their male counterparts, who pretend to act as their protectors. These so-called protectors construct a world in which women occupy a dependent position, subject to the arbitrariness of male power. The Kolkata rape-murder case highlights in an extreme manner the situation that women face in their everyday lives. Under patriarchy, spaces become male territories, which women have to navigate in a careful manner. It is this structural scaffolding, this prior social space into which women are inserted from their birth, that is ignored in mainstream thinking.
Focus is placed on the depraved proclivities of the individual, instead of focusing on the male power from such proclivities flow. The accused in the Kolkata rape case, Sanjoy Roy, has been found to be a porn addict. He has been married four times and is notorious for being a “womanizer”. While the misogynist personality of the rapist clarifies the immediate causes of the case, it fails to emphasize the social roots of the problem that women face. Rape doesn’t happen because a few men start having a personal urge to assault women. This framing suggests that rape is a localized instance of malfunctioning, in which men somehow lose control over themselves, overcome by a natural instinct aggression. The solution then consists of punishing certain men so that the overall social body can be maintained it its general purity and health. However, it is the social body itself which is poisoned to its core. There is no standard of normality to which one can compare brutal cases of rape. The gruesomeness of the Kolkata rape case reflects the general gruesomeness of the society in which we live. Patriarchal violence can’t be confined to a group of pornographic videos that a man has watched on his phone. Rather, we need to ask why such violent videos are produced in the first place, the interests that are served by the commodification of female sexuality. The answer inevitably implicates all men: all men are responsible for perpetuating a social order in which their power holds sway over women. All men are guilty for profiting from a system of patriarchal oppression that benefits them. Whether through violent rapes, misogynist jokes, or silent passivity, all men participate in the reproduction of patriarchy.
Insofar as the patriarchal system is based on the expropriation of the decision-making capacities of women, it is imperative that the male-led order be combated by a militant emphasis on female autonomy. Instead of peacefully pleading for the recognition of female suffering, the feminist movement has to irreverently ignore how the male public perceives their politics. This is centered in the “Take Back the Night” march that the women of Kolkata are organizing. The march asserts that women have the right to walk alone in the city at night. It is a common argument that women shouldn’t go out in night because there are chances that they may get assaulted by men. In terms of its factual accuracy, this argument is correct: men will definitely rape women who are walking alone at night. But in terms of its normative import, the argument is completely wrong: why does one leave unquestioned the patriarchal desire to rape women? Why is one not focusing on the system of oppression that allows men to rape women? Just because men feel entitled to the sexual services of women doesn’t mean that women should organize their lives around this feeling of entitlement.
On the contrary, one needs to ignore the confidence that enables men to rape women. One needs to actively disrespect all commands to behave carefully in front of men. The misogynist behavior of men needs to be loudly decried and publicly shamed. If men think that they can use the tool of rape to scare off women from public spaces, then women need to reclaim to those spaces, they need to fight against men. Periyar outlined this as a strategy in which the humiliation and degradation of women is reciprocally answered by the humiliation and degradation of men: “If a man has the right to kill women, a woman should also have the right to kill men. If there is a compulsion that women should fall at men’s feet, then men should also fall at women’s feet.” On Independence Day, it is imperative that we understand how freedom consists not of nationalist deference but of militant energies, a feminist anger that overthrows self-assured patriarchs.
Yanis Iqbal is an undergraduate student of political science at Aligarh Muslim University, India. He is the author of the book Education in the Age of Neoliberal Dystopia. He has published more than 300 articles in different magazines and websites on imperialism, social movements, political theory, education, and cultural criticism.
